"Dungeons & Dragons Is a Lot Like Religion" Topic

"These days Joseph Laycock is an assistant professor of religious studies at Texas State University, but in a former life he was a middle-school Dungeons & Dragons player. Back then, D&D was the subject of a massive smear campaign claiming that the game promoted suicide and satanism. A Christian student who learned that Laycock played D&D chided him for "worshiping gods from books," a charge he found puzzling.

"Most Christians know about their god primarily through a book, through the Bible," Laycock says in Episode 185 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "So there was a really strange reversal there, where I found a lot of the claims-makers were actually engaging in the very sort of behavior they were accusing D&D players of doing."

The incident kicked off a lifelong interest in the parallels between religion and role-playing, an idea Laycock explores in his new book Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says About Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds. His research revealed that critics of D&D were not being frank about their motives. What really bothered them about this game of gods and demons, he discovered, was not that it was opposed to Christianity, but that it was so similar to it…"
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Amicalement
Armand

So is anyone else tired of those damn RPGA twits knocking on the door asking to run the household through "The Keep on the Borderlands"?

Interesting.

Have you heard the good news about Orcus?

Glad you enjoyed it my friend!.

Amicalement
Armand

Rubber Suit Theatre:
<So is anyone else tired of those damn RPGA twits knocking on the door asking to run the household through "The Keep on the Borderlands"?>

Nah, I just tell 'em we're Reformed Runequestarians, point at the front-yard shrines of St Steven Jackson and the Venerable Louis Zocchi and they take off like a fighter in +5 plate being chased by a Rust Monster.